What I’m working on this week (July 23 – 27)

Yikes! I can’t believe it’s nearly the end of the month already. They say “time flies when you’re having fun” and I’m having a blast. I love what I do: I write stuff that is interesting to me, I have great clients, and I get to hang out at home with my wife all day long (we both work from home). It really doesn’t get better than that.

So, what am I working on this week? Well, let me tell you story: Years ago, when I was first starting out, I got paid per word… and I didn’t get paid very much. So my goal was to write as much as I could to pay the bills and get lots of experience and earn my chops. It was no problem to hit 10,000 words per day pretty frequently… and I was motivated to do it because I needed the money!

Things are different today. My business is busy. I have only a few clients. I get paid a lot more and the metric I am paid on is not per word. As my business changed, I got away from writing a large quantity. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing because it’s easy to burn out with that number of words). But I lost something along the way: I loved waking up and thinking: “I’m going to hit 10,000 words today”. I loved those focused days of writing. I loved the big, audacious goal of 10,000 words. I’m a writer and I’m at my very best when I’m pounding away on my keyboard.

(Note: Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that there is a spectrum between quality and quantity and my 10,000 words sacrifice quality for quantity. There are other factors at play to ensure that I still write quality content — I do a lot of planning and I have review/edit cycles at the end).

So, I realized recently that I wanted (NEEDED!) to get back to what my business was truly about — writing — instead of getting caught up in the busyness of other things. So last week I set a goal for 10,000 words and although I had a couple of interruptions later in the day, I was able to work late and finish.

And I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt old school! So this week I’m doing it again. My goal is to hit 10,000 words on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That leaves Tuesday and Thursday to do the other things that my business requires, as well as to actually act on the content I wrote on those focused days (i.e., edit the content, send the content to clients, plan the next 10K day, etc.)

So this week’s 30,000 words will include some content for an income fund that needs some marketing (my contract with them is finished as soon as I can complete their work), a real estate investor client, a credit repair expert, and a whole bunch of writing for my own business — blogs, articles, etc.